Global

Arguably the biggest story right now is the announcement of Stripe Capital’s new end-to-end lending API for platforms to offer financing options to their SMB customers. (Simon Taylor wrote a great piece on this at the weekend.) This is taken from our Unfiltered newsletter. Subscribe now for a no BS, uncensored analysis of fintech news and hot topics delivered to your inbox each fortnight.

How many times have you looked at a job posting only to see the mention of free fruit? Sure it’s nice to have free food, but what purpose does it serve and does it have anything to do with employee wellbeing?

The fourth episode of our brand-new video series, Decoding: Banking as a Service, is here! If you missed it (or any of the others) catch up here. Here’s a rundown of this episode if you prefer reading to watching 📖

Behavioural design is the process of using psychological insights into how people think and act irrationally, to design better products and services. Sounds good, right? But…er… what does that actually look like?

Businesses are slowly awakening to the idea that it's time to consider new sources of growth when it comes to securing their futures. They’ve realised that, sometimes, designing the most engaging customer value propositions requires leaning on the brand strength of other players outside of your domain.

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) is one of the hottest trends in fintech. The concept of 0% finance has been around for decades, but it’s caught fire in the last 3 years with new market entrants like Affirm, Afterpay and Klarna transforming how this works for consumers in an e-commerce setting. This is taken from our Unfiltered newsletter. Subscribe now for a no BS, uncensored analysis of fintech news and hot topics delivered to your inbox each fortnight.

While FinTech folk salivate – and the big banks bloviate – about PSD2 and the open banking reforms coming our way in 2018, we wondered whether those outside of this bubble will actually notice? What does PSD2 actually mean for customers?

A Black-owned bank is defined as one in which at least 50% of voting shares are owned by African-Americans. They’re a dwindling force in the States today.

Throughout history, humans have found direction from statements of intent that suggest 'better' ways of living.

The first episode of our brand-new video series, Decoding: Banking as a Service, is live! If you missed it, catch up here. Here’s a rundown of the episode if you prefer reading to watching 📖

Nothing’s worse than not having any options, but having too many can be just as bad.

We now live in a world where almost anyone can build and launch innovative, regulated financial products as easily as they can create a Shopify page - that’s the magic of Banking as a Service (BaaS).

As 11:FS wraps up its 5th year in business, we can’t help but think about what the next 5 will look like. And our ambitions are big. It’s only just on the right side of scary.

Richard Brown, CTO at R3, says that blockchain allows us to, for the first time, build systems and technologies that run between different organisations that don’t trust each other and bring them to consensus. This means potentially significant savings for financial services, especially in file reconciliation and manual activity. For blockchain to succeed in finance, multiple firms must work together, and Corda is helping to do just that.

As we roll into 2018 thoughts inevitably turn to the big themes that we might expect (and hope) to see for user experience in the financial services industry this year.